Pierre Janet

Revue Philosophique 22 (Decembre 1886) 577-592

Translated by Ed Brown

         The suggestions that can be imposed on hypnotized subjects during sleep or even while awake have already been studied and described in a very complete fashion by many observers; however,  they can still give rise to some interesting psychological observations. Having had the occasion to observe some cases of this genre, I want to present them so that it is possible to critique them and to connect them to similar cases, having studied them in a manner more complete.
                                                                                                                 I

         The subject on which these researches have been done is a young woman aged nineteen that I have been able to study with precision and during a long time, thanks to the good offices of Dr. Powilewicz. We will designate her by the letter L. This person was struck with grand hysteria, and when I knew her,  she had attacks every day for several hours. Hypnotic sleep and suggestions  had an evident therapeutic influence on this patient.1   It was during one of these crises that we  put L. to sleep for the first time. Some passeses sufficed to stop the convulsions and the delirium [délire] and to replace her agitation with the most complete hypnotic sleep.
         Once asleep L. was able to hear me and to respond to my questions,  which she was not able to do a moment earlier during the hysterical crisis. Through suggestion it was easy to provoke all the characteristic phenomena of somnambulism. Contractures, movements, and hallucinations, were all completely carried out on command,  which indicated, as early as the  first attempt, a rather deep somnambulism. It was easy to wake the patient by a word and to put her to sleep again by an agreed upon gesture, because post hypnotic suggestions also succeeded very well.  All the phenomena that I have been able to reproduce being well known, I will only insist  on one interesting detail.
 In the first sessions the suggestions to be executed  had to be understood and accepted by the subject. If I asked her to raise her arm, L began by responding to me “yes” in a very deep voice, then she raised her arm which remained contracted above her head.  If I commanded her to take an action or experience a hallucination on waking, she again responded  “yes,” and then on waking, executed the order given and accepted. This acceptance was indespensible. One day, while she was asleep, I told her to do something that she  displeased her, no doubt, very much. She responded “non” to several repetitions of this command, and on waking did not execute the act. At certain moments L. had  a great tendency to resist, and responded “non” to the majority of suggestions, which then were not carried out. However, sleep was not interupted and on awakining forgetting was complete.
         After four sessions, while asleep, L., for the first time, had a sort of catalepsy, which was produced naturally when I tried to deepen her sleep by continuing to make passes for a long time. Her limbs remained in the position where one placed them. Her movements, once started, continued, and her face assumed an expression that was in harmony with them. This state lasted  a little while and was soon replaced by ordinary somnambulism; but the latter appeared more profound and the power of resistance to suggestions was much diminished.
 Not only did she no longer refuse to obey,  she  no longer made signs of acceptance,  executing suggestions without any response to them at all.  Complicated acts, associated with hallucinations could be executed during sleep or after waking. It is at that moment that I tried  to verify the experiments of M. Delboef (Revue Philosophique 1886 tome 2p.441) on the conservation of memory after hypnotic sleep.   I acheived identical results: when one wakes the subject abruptly, in the midst of a suggested act, he preserves a memory like like that of a dream. The same is true when it is not a question  of an act or a movement, but of a simple hallucination. I tell L. that there is a green Bengale light in the room  and  she admires it, then choosing a moment where she is completely immobile in her contemplation I wake her abruptly. To do that it is enough to clap my hands, our agreed upon signal.  On waking she looks around with astonishment: “Why did you put out the green Bengale light... ah! it was a dream.”
         It appears to me that there is  an exception to the law proposed by Delboeuf. When the subject has  been put to sleep abruptly in the midst of a waking act, the idea which appears in consiciousness after being abruptly awoken is not a memory from the period of sleep, but rather the act begun and interupted while awake.  It is as if the period of somnambulism had not existed and  the two waking moments are joined together.  In the midst of a conversation, L. is put to sleep before being able to finish her sentence. After a quarter of an hour of sleep, she is woken and   tranquilly finishes the conversation she had begun, without suspecting that she had slept. The same phenomena occurs  for periods of sleep. Once put back to sleep, L. continues an act begun during the previous period of sleep.  One can thereby have two very bizarre, interupted and restarted,  conversations with her,  one during her waking states and the other during her periods of sleep.

                                                                                                         II

         At this moment it was not difficult to perceive that the majority of suggestions were no longer presented in the same manner as in the beginning: they had become unconscious. Previously L. knew what I asked of her and what she did in executing it, since she could discuss the order. Now she no longer understood the order, or at least always responded  with sincerity as as if she had not understood it. Still she executed it with a geat precision, though without knowing what she was doing. I suddenly ordered her to,  “Thumb your nose.” Her hands were placed at the tip of her nose. Asked what she was doing, she always responded that she was doing nothing and continued to talk for a long time without  suspecting that her hands continued to wiggle the tip of her nose. I had her walk across the room; she contued to speak and believe herself to be seated. Curiously, she heard me perfectly when I talked with her and responded sensibly to me. However if I interupted a sentence to abruptly give an order, she heard the sentence and did not hear the order, which was executed without her knowledge. Naturally she did not have  the least memory of the suggestion thus executed. In this way when I ordered her to cry, she really sobbed,  but continued, in the midst of her tears, to talk about very happy things. When the sobing stopped, no trace of that  grief, which had never been conscious, remained.
 One day I asked her  to exert all her strength to resist me. She appeared not to understand very well because she did not remember to obey. She assured me, while laughing at it, that she was certainly not acting, as I was going to say. I ordered something and my order was immediately executed. She continued to laugh, saying , “So try  to order  me, I will do nothing at all.” In a word all that which was connected to the suggestion no longer penetrated her consciousness.
         Perhaps I must reconcile this unconsciousness of suggestions with a detail of the same genre that struck me from the beginning and that I have not been able to understand. During waking as during somnambulism, L. was completely anaesthetic; she had no cutaneous sensibility either on the right or the left and did not appreciate pain , heat or contact. She no longer had any muscular sense and with her eyes closed she did not know the position of her limbs. She said that she lost her limbs in her bed, but  was perusaded that it was the same for the everybody. I have even noticed that this loss of the muscular  sense was accompanied by a very evident diminution in the visual appreciation of distances. However, if one puts L. in a cataleptic state, her limbs remain in the positions where they are put; her movements continue and her face takes on a corresponding expression. Was there not in this suggestions conveyed through the  muscular sense? If I squeeze her fist, her face takes on an air of furor and her arms throw punches. It appears that she knew that her fist was squeezed. However, whether waking or asleep, she never knows if I squeeze her fist or if I raise her arm. Is this again an unconscious suggestion as previously? Is the anesthesia of hysterics,  as M. Bernheim says clearly for hysterical blindness, only a “purely psychic anesthesia?”  Does the sensation really enter  her brain, while “the hysteric unconsciously neutralizes it with her imagination” and does it continue to produce the same effects as if it were really preceived?
         Let us remark finally, as M. Bernheim and M. Richet have already observed, that the same genre of suggestions were still possible in the waking state. If I ordered L. to do something before putting her to sleep she did not appear to understand the order, although  when she awoke, she executed the act mechanically.
 One day, without having warned her, I tried  another experiment. I asked another person M. M.... to order her to do something in my absense, but in my name. In the middle of the day M.M.... while talking with her, interupted himself abruptly and said to her, “M. Janet wants yout to raise both of your arms in the air and remain motionless.” This was immediately done. Both of her arms remained contracted above her head.  L. was not at all affected by this and continued what she was saying. When we produced  a permanent state, like the contracture of her arms, we could force L. to notice them by making her  to try to find her arms, to look at them and to try to move them. This frightened her. She began crying and  a crisis would have begun if, through a word, we did not remove the contracture. Once cured, with the tears still in her eyes, she did not remember any of this and resumed what she was doing, at the point where we had interupted them.
         All that  I have just said applies to suggested actions, in the execution of which one can notice no species of consciousness. When, by contrast, we have suggesed an hallucination, the order was not heard, but the hallucination itself was conscious, that is to say,  it suddenly invaded  consciousness, without  L.  being able to know where it comes from. “You are going, I say to her, to drink a glass of cognac.” She has heard nothing. Her arm raises itself automatically. When it approaches her lips, she tastes, and when asked, says that she is drinking cognac. She is pleased because the doctor had forbidden her to do this. Her forgetting  is very rapid. It is necessary to interrogate her quickly enough to establish her fleeting consciousness of the hallucination. Save in this case, where the suggestion evidently cannot be executed without a certain perception, consciousness appeared completely abolished.

                                                                                                    III

            Once convinced of this unconsciousness, which without a doubt has already been noticed by many observers, but that I had not yet established to this degree, I have tried to determine how far it extended, that is to say, what were the psychological  phenomena that could assume this character. At the same time I tried to shed some light on a small previously described psychological problem related to hypnotic suggestion.
         Paul Janet, in articles that he has published on hypnotism, and through which he has introduced philosophers these puzzling and neglected phenomena of human thought, has raised some questions about a particular type of suggestion.  M.M. Richet et Bernheim  have presented examples of suggestions where the subject was told to act, not on waking, but at the end of a certain number of days.  Bernheim writes, “I told A.S...., while he was asleep that he  would return to see me at the end of thirteen days. Awoken, he remembers nothing, but on the thirteenth day at ten oclock he was present.” Of this Paul Janet writes, “I admit that these ignored memories, as M. Ch. Richet calls them, can be reawakened at any time under certain circumstances. I can also understand  the return of these images and acts at a fixed time, if the operator associates them with the appearance of a vivid sensation. For the example, “The day when you see M. you will embrace him,” the sight of M. serves as a stimulus to awaken the idea. But what I absolutely do not understand, is waking on a fixed day without a reference point to connect to the measurement of time, for example, in thirteen days. Thirteen days does not represent  a sensation; it is an abstraction. To make sense of these facts it is necessary to suppose an unconscious faculty to measure time. However, this is an unknown faculty.” Charles Richet responded at length, but if I do not deceive myself, he hardly does more than confirm the exactness of the observation and connect it vaguely to others of the same type. “Intelligence, he says, can work outside of the self, and since it works, it can measure time. This is an operation evidently simpler than finding a name, making poetry or solving a problem in geometry, all things that one can accomplish without the self participating.”
         To clarify this question a little, I confess that I would not pose the problem in the same way as Paul Janet. “It is, he says, a new observation of a wholly other order than previous ones and which if it was true, would make us enter a domain of mysterious and unknown faculties, resembling those of animal magnetism, clairvoyance, pressentiment etc.” I am not able to share this opinion. The somnambulist to whom one suggests accomplishing an act in thirteen days has no need of a peculiar and mysterious faculty to measure time. He is in the same situation as all of us. He sees day and night; he sees the hour on clocks. I do not understand why he would measure time in a mysterious fashion, when nothing prevents him from measuring it in the ordinary way. But, one says, he does not remember, he is not consciousness of the suggestion. That does not prevent day and night from making an impression on him, and to execute the suggestion at the stated hour, he has only to count them. It is true that this count must be made without consciousness,  since the subject in his ordinary consciousness does not know that he has an action to accomplish in thirteen days. But , in every way, this is only a faculty of unconsciously counting perfectly real things and not a mysterious faculty of measuring  time, which appears useless to me here. That said, I find that Paul Janet is perfectly right, on the other hand, to distinguish this operation from ordinary memory, and  this particular type of suggestion from all others. When one makes an ordinary suggestion: “As soon as you see M. X. .. kiss him,” the somnambulist, once awoken, retains nothing in his consciousness, or rather he preserves an association of latent ideas which do not need  to be immediately translated  into psycholoogical phenomena. We do not know all the latent associations which  are in our minds. The sight of some person may  awaken a sad or happy idea in us, which we do not currently suspect. The awakened somnambulist has a additional latent  association in his mind. The sight of  M.X. awakens  the idea of embracing him. There is nothing here other than the most normal psychology. In the second case, however, when one says to him: “You will do such an act in thirteen days,” his mind is not able to entirely forget the suggestion on waking. The latter cannot remain latent until the thirteenth day, because the thirteenth day, not being   different from others, does not arouse the suggested idea any  more than the twelth or fourteenth. From the moment of waking and during the subsequent days he must continue thinking: “Today is the first day, or the second....”  When he finally thinks: “This  is the thirteenth,” the association will be made.
         It is evident to everyone, however, that the somnambulists, who have been awoken, do not have such a memory, and are not conscious of having made  these observations or this count. However the count must have been made. We have not an association here, that is to say, a pure persistant possibility in the latent state. We have  true psychological phenomena: observing and counting, in a word, judgements, persisting for thirteen days in the mind of an individual without him being conscious of it. An unconscious judgement is a completely different thing from a latent association.
 The problem thus can be reduced to terms which appear simpler to me. I have tried first to verify the observation in question. The subject  with whom I have occupied myself presented very good examples of latent associations, as in the manner with which I put her to sleep, by raising her arms. I questioned her one day in the waking state to see if she knew how I put her to sleep. She absolutely did not know. I spoke to her about the sign of the raised arm. She believed it was a joke, but nonetheless raised her arm and immediately went to sleep. Eh Bien! In the same way, could she make judgements unconsciously and count without knowing it?
         L. being in an established state of somnambulism, I make the suggestion:  “When I have struck twelve blows with my hands, you will go back to sleep.”  As we had already established the suggestion did not appear to enter into her consciousness. On waking it was completely forgotten. It would have been peculiar, moreover, if, on waking, she had preserved a memory of something that had not been conscious during somnambulism.
 The important thing here was that the forgetting was assured to me by several things. First, by the previous state of sleep, which was a true hypnotic sleep with all the characteristic signs;  second, by its agreement with  all those who are occuppied with these questions and who have completely established the forgetting of similar suggestions on waking; finally through the series of   previous experiments where I had seen this unconsciousness establish itself little by little.
 Other people gathered around L. and spoke to her about different things. Standing back a few feet, I clapped my hands five times at intervals and weakly. Noticing then that the subject was paying no attention to me and talking animatedly I approached and said to her: “Have you heard what I have just done? --What then, I was not paying attention; --And that? (I clapped my hands.--You have just clapped your hands,--How many times? --Once.”  I stepped back again and continued to clap quietly from time to time. L. , distracted, was not listening any longer. When I had clapped six times, which with the previous claps made twelve,  L. stopped immediately, closed her eyes and fell into sleep. “ Why do you sleep? I asked her. --I do not know anything about it, it has just hit me.”
         If I do not deceive myself, this  is a simplified version of  Richet and Bernheim’s experiement. The somnambulist had  to count, but in place of counting days,  which makes one believe that time is being measured, she had to count sounds. There was no new faculty, because all the claps were easy to hear.  Although she she claimed to hear only one clap, she must have heard  and counted all of them, without knowing it, that is, unconsciously. The experiment was easy to repeat, and I have redone it in many ways.  L. counts unconsciously to 43, with the claps are sometimes regular and sometimes irregular, and without her ever failing to acheive the expected result. In one of the more striking experiments I ordered her, “At the third clap, raise your hands; at the fifth, lower them; at the sixth, thumb your nose; at the ninth, walk into the room; at the sixteenth,  go to sleep in a chair.” Without remembering receiving these orders,  all of the actions were accomplished at the desired number. During this time L. responded to questions that were being addressed of her and had no awareness of counting sounds,  thumbing her nose, or walking around.
         After having repeating the experiment, I carried out variations. I tried  to obtain very simple unconscious judgements. “When I say the same letter twice, you will be paralyzed.”After waking her, I whisper the letters  “a...c...d...e... a...a...” L. remains motionless and entirely contracted. This is an unconscious judgement of resemblance. She could also make judgements of difference. For example, “you are going to sleep when I say an odd number”  or  “when I pronounce a name of a woman, your hands will begin  to turn one over the other.” The result is the same. Every time I whisper  even numbers or the name of a man nothing happens. The suggestion is executed when I give the sign. L. has  unconsciously heard, compared and appreciated these differences.
         I then tried to complicate the experiment to see how far this faculty of unconscious judgement went.  “When the sum of numbers that I am going to pronounce make 10, your hands will throw a kiss.”  The same precautions are taken. She is woken. Forgetting is established.  At a distance from her, while she talks with others, who distract her as much as possible, I whisper 2..3..1..4.  The movement is made. After this I tried more complicated sums or other calculations. “When the numbers that I am going to say in pairs, subtracted one from the other, give a remainder of 6..” or multiplications and even very simple divisions. All of thse are carried out almost without error, except when the calculation becomes too complicated and cannot  be done in her head. As  I have remarked, there was here no new faculty, but ordinary phenomena executed unconsciously.
         It appears to me that these experiments are directly related to the problem raised in the Revue littéraire. The facts described were perfectly exact. Somnambulists can count the days and hours  which precede the carrying out of a suggestion, although they have no memory of the suggestion itself. Outside of  consciousness, we do not know how, there is  memory which persists,  attention which is always awake, and  judgement  capable of counting days, since it can even do multiplication and division. It is not less true, however,  because one  hardly expeced to find such automatic and unconscious phenomena, that their study can have the most important consequences for psychology.

                                                                                                            IV

         The previous experiments once explained, we arrive naturally at a new phenomenon which has often been presented as a mystery and has been the point of departure of all the doctrine of spiritisme, but which appears to me  as the predictable development of the observations already made. There evidently exist in the L.’s head  some important psychological operations that are outside of her normal consciousness. How can one render them perceptible through a sign or a language?  Since speech reveals nothing; let us try another type of sign , namely, writing.  “When I clap my hands, take the pencil and paper on the table and  write the word “bonjour.” At the sign given, the word is written, rapidly but legibly.  L. does not perceive what she has done.
'You wrote that word.'
 'I did what I did without knowing it.'
 The word was written, but this wass still only an automatism, which did not show great intelligence.
'You are going to multiply by writing 739 by 42.'
 Her right hand writes  the numbers, does the calculation and stops only when it is finished. During all this time, L., wide awake, tells me about the activities of her day, without stoping  once,  while her right hand calculates correctly. I want to give more independence to this unconscious intelligence.     “Write a letter of any kind.”
          Here is that which she wrote, unconsciously ,  after being awoken.     'Madame, I cannot come on Sunday, as I had intended. Please excuse me. It would be a pleasure for me to come with you, but I cannot accept for that day. Your friend L. --P.S. best to the children. '
         This automatic letter is correct and indicates a certain reflection. While she wrote it, L. talked about other things and responded to many people. Moreover, she knew nothing about this letter when I showed it to her, and  insisted  that I had copied her signature. Curiously, when I wanted to begin this experiment again, L. wrote exactly the same letter a second time without changing a word. It appeared  that the machine was equipped in  this way and cannot be disturbed.  The handwriting in these letters is interesting. It is analogous to  L.’s normal writing, but not identical. It is  slanted and very loose. The words have a tendency to elongate themselves indefinitely. Charles Richet, to whom I have shown these fragments of automatic writing, told me that this characteristic was constant in the writing of mediums that  he has had occasion to observe, and that in their letters a word often fills a whole line.
         Automatic writing is a well known fact. Permit me to recall in this connection a very remarkable passage from M. Taine who showed the possibility and  interest of this phenomenon. “The more bizarre a fact is, the more instructive it is. In this regard, spirit manifestations  direct us to discoveries, by showing us the coexistence, at the same moment, in the same individual, of two thoughts, two wills and two distinct actions, one of which is conscious, while the other  is not, and is attributed to invisible beings... There is a person who, while talking and singing and without looking at the paper, writes whole sentences and even entire pages without being consciousness  of what she has written. To my eyes, her sincerity is perfect. She declares,  at the end of the page, that she has no  idea of what has been written on the paper. When she reads it, she is astonished and sometime alarmed by it. ... Certainly, we have established here a doubling of the self, the simultaneous presence of two series of parallel and independent ideas,  two centers of action or, if you please,  two moral persons together in the same brain. Each has two tasks,  one on the stage, the other in the wings...”2
 This phenomenon has also been very well studied by an excellent English psychologist, F. Myers, who has devoted himself to the difficult study of these unconscious psychological phenomena.3  But what appears interesting to me in the cases that I have reported, is that I can be present during the development of this automatic writing, that is to say, during its formation. I have  also been able, over  time, see its consequences.
         After having made L write several automatic letters of this type, I had the idea of interrogating her at the moment that I made a suggestion to her and ordering her to respond to me in writing. I  began by posing a question during sleep. I then woke the subject,  in order to be more certain of the forgetting and  the unconsciousness, and to have a truely automatic response. At an agreed signal, L. took the pen and wrote a response without knowing it. It did not long to notice that  it was not necessary to put her back to sleep for each question. It was sufficient to suggest to her, only once while she was  asleep, to respond in writing to my questions, for her, once awoken, to do it all the time in the same automatic manner. At that moment L., although woken, appeared to no longer  see  or hear me consciously. She did not look at me and spoke to everyone but  me. If I addressed a question to her, she responded to me in writing, without interupting what she was saying to others. It was necesssary for me to change tone entirely and even to take her hand to force her to listen to me  again in the ordinary way. Then she trembled lightly and appeared a little surprised to see me again.
 “Well, I have forgotten that you were here”
 But as soon as I removed myself a little, she again forgot me, and began  to respond to me in writing.

                                                                                                                    V

         In the presence of these new facts it was no longer really possible to maintain entirely our previous statementss on  unconsciousness  suggestions. Applying this expression to the previous observations hardly made sense any longer. What is an unconscious judgement, an unconscious multiplication? If speech is for us the sign of the consciousness of another, why wouldn’t  writing also be a characteristic sign? One could no longer say that there was an absence of  consciousness in L., but rather two consciousnesses. The subject being prepared as previously described and responding through automatic writing, we had the following conversation:
 'Do you hear me?'
 (She responds by writing) 'Non.'
 'But to respond you must hear.'
 'Yes absolutely.'
 'Then how do you do it?'
  'I don’t know.'
 'There must be someone who hears me.'
 'Yes.'
 'Who is that?'
 'Other than L.'
 'Ah bien! An other person; do you want  that we call her Blanche?'
  'Oui, Blanche.'
  'Then Blanche do you hear me?'
 'Yes.'
              Without doubt it was me who suggested the name of this personage and gave her thus a sort of individuality, but we have seen how it developed spontaneously. I  hardly did  more than baptize it.
         When I showed the these written responses to L, it produced a little incident. She had personal reasons to  have a horror at the name Blanche and wanted rip up the paper where that name was written. This detail, with a thousand others, proves the subject’s sincerity  and the absolute unconsciousness  with which she had written the name Blanche, which she and not wanted even to read. It was necessary to begin the naming again.
 'What name do you want?'
  'Any name.'
 'Ok, that will be easier.'
 'Eh bien, Adrienne.'
         The somnambulists have their caprices, it is necessary to conform onself to them. From then on I maintained conversations either with L. who responded with speech or with Adrienne who responded in writing. It sufficed to change the name for there never to be an error. It was no longer necessary to put her to sleep. The  name  Adrienne alone was sufficient to produce automatic responses, that is to say, responses ignored by L..
         The responses that I  obtained in this way do not have great interest. The manner in which they were written is stranger than their content. They were almost always very simple, “yes,” “no” and very frequently  “I don’t know.” I have not seen the least trace of any lucidity in these responses. I have never observed mental suggestion which, according to Myers, should not be rare in cases of automatic writing. There were only a few interesting pieces of information in these responses that I am going to summarize.
         1st. The suggestions that I had always considered as unconscious were in reality only so for L. Adrienne was always aware them. She could write them even after waking. It was she who raised her arms,  she who counted the signals. "L.," wrote Adreinne, "did not hear, or if she heard a little, she resisted and there was dispute.” One day I had had an interesting proof of this Adrienne's obedience of without L.'s awareness. One day I suggested to Adrienne that she come to Dr. Powilewicz’s the next day at two o’clock. The next day at that hour L. entered the doctor’s.  I was waiting for her and I interogated her. But when she spoke to me (through her mouth) she appeared to experience a peculiar hallucination. She believed that she was at home moving furniture. She insisted that she had not gone out. When I interrogated Adrienne, she responded to me sensibly, in writing writing, that she had come on my order, but that L. knew nothing of it. Everything had occurred as in ordinary suggestions, but, at first, I had not understood it. It is unnecessary to add that, that night, L. had no knowledge of her visit to the doctor, while Adrienne remembered it very well.
         2nd Here is another obeservation that I have been able to make using the same proceedure.  L was, as I have said, a grande hystérique. Although her crises were much diminished in intensity and frequency since the beginning of the hypnotic sessions, she still had them from time to time. When she was in the grip of an attack of hysteria, some time even after the crisis, the automatisme  almost disappeared. L. still heard me, but  Adrienne no longer obeyed.  If I succeeded, through suggestion, in making her write, she wrote without stopping:  "I am frightened, I am frightened,” and did not respond. It occurred to me that during a hysterical crisis, it was the second personnage,
Adrienne, who was speaking.
         I  easily obtained a demonstration of this. L. had complicated crises. Starting with convulsions, she went on to have terrifying hallucinations in which hidden men played a major role. I had never obtained an explanation of these terrors, because in the waking state, or in the somnambulistic state, she did not have any memory of what occurred during the crisis. One day I decided to interrogate Adrienne, using writing, on this subject. She recounted  all the incidents of the crisis and their origin.  "First I see a curtain, then hidden men who frighten me...in the country, on a summer evening, at my grandmothers, during vacation, two men cane, then in the garden, a great curtain that they had put on the trees and looked out from behind,  which frightened us and  still frightened me.” I must point out that  L.,  interrogated with care a moment later, did not recall any of these  details and only vaguely recalled that, at the age of seven, she had had a serious illness following a fright.
         3rd The subject was susceptible to true catalepsy. She could enter into that peculiar state where the position of the limbs suggest expressions to the whole body with surprising harmony and truth. For a long time  we have tried to grasp what occurrs in the consciousness of a cataleptic, or even  if consciousness is present. L., being in catalepsy and not responding to me at all or sometimes echoing my words, I addressed myself to Adrienne. I ordered her to pick up a pencil, which she did  while her body remained in catalepsy. I took the left and hand and squeezed it into a fist. Her face immediately took on an expression of anger and her left hand began punching.
'Adriene, what are you doing?'
 Her right arm writes without the expression of her body being modified
' I am furious. ?'
'Against who?'
'Against F.'
'Why?'
'I do not know...but I am angry.'
I took her left hand, opened her fist and put her hand on her lips. She smiled and threw kisses.
'Adrienne, are you still agnry?'
'No, it has passed.'
'And now?'
'Oh, I am content.'
'And L.'
'She knows nothing, she sleeps.'
I say 'bonjour.'
The mouth echos, 'Bonjour.'
'Adrienne, what have you just said?'
'Bonjour.'
'Does L. know it?'
'No, since she knows nothing.'
         4th--L. was also susceptible to lethargy, much more rarely and less clearly than the previous states, it is true. We could hardly provoke it artificially. L. fell into it spontaneously in the midst of somnambulism. This state began with a general contracture which dissipated by itself. The subject remained in a state of profound sleep with muscular relaxation. The muscles did retain a certain rather strong hyperexcitability. Pressure provoking a rather weak and fleeting contracture only of the muscle pressed.  In this state I knew for a long time that L. would not move and appeared not to hear. One day, during this lethargy, I said to Adrienne:
'Adrienne, squeeze my hand'. She did it.
'Write, do you hear?'
'Yes'.
'Get up.'
'Strength fails me'.
She then responded some monosyllables and her lethargie dissipated itself.
          There were still many experiements and studies  for me to do on this very interesting question and on this personality created, so to speak, experimentally, when an incident which was very happy for the patient came to interupt everything. It was completely natural to use the domination that I had acquired over L. for her benefit and healing. Little by little through specific suggestions, repeated during somnambulism, I made the most severe of the symptoms of her hysteria disappear: the headaches, the convulsions, the hysteriogenic points etc. The illness diminished day by day, but to my great surprise her hypnotic sleep diminished at the same time. Lethergy and catalepsy disappeared; suggestions became less and less clear cut. L. again began to hear suggestions, to discuss them and to respond 'yes,' as she had at the beginning.
         One day I pronounced the name of Adrienne, it was L. who responded, laughing, and asking who I was calling by that name. Adrienne had lived. From that moment I was not able  to ressucitate her or to obtain automatic writing. Moreover a few days later her hypnotic sleep, which had stopped being interesting, disappeared entirely and it was impossible for me to put the subject to sleep by any proceedure.
         L. since that day was in very good health and had no crises for three months. The psychological experiments have therefore been done  for the benefit of the subject herself.
         The facts that I have just recounted are still very incomplete since my experiments have been interupted too abruptly, but it is very reasonable that one must try them again easily enough. All the suggestions must be accompanied by a certain degree of unconsciousness or rather, if I generalize from what I have seen, by a certain doubling of consciousness. All the phenomena of spiritsme which are frequent, are only the development of analogous facts. I hope that it will not be difficult to verify  and to discus through other experiments that which I have reported; it will be easier then to derive from these obseervations the consequences that they contain.

       Pierre Janet